Breaker

by Minette Walters

  "It's possible. She seemed pretty relaxed with him."

  "How well do you know her?"

  But Ingram wasn't so easily drawn about his private life. "As well as I know anyone else around here," he said casually. "What did you make of Harding, as a matter of interest?"

  "Difficult to say. He gives a convincing performance of wanting nothing to do with Kate Sumner, but as my boss pointed out, dislike is as good a reason for rape and murder as any other. He claims she was harassing him by smearing crap all over his car because he'd rejected her. It might be true, but none of us really believes it."

  "Why not? There was a case down here three years ago when a wife smashed her husband's Jag through the front door of his lover's house. Women can get pretty riled when they're given the elbow."

  "Except he says he never slept with her."

  "Maybe that was her problem."

  "How come you're on his side all of a sudden?"

  "I'm not. The rules say keep an open mind, and that's what I'm trying to do."

  Galbraith chuckled. "He wants us to believe he's a bit of a stud, presumably on the basis that a man who has access to sex on tap doesn't need to rape anyone, but he can't or won't produce the names of women he's slept with. And neither can anyone else." He shrugged. "Yet no one questions his reputation for laddish behavior. They're all quite confident he entertains ladies on his boat even though the SOCOs couldn't come up with any evidence to support it. His bedlinen's stiff with dried semen, but there were only two hairs on it that weren't his, and neither of them was Kate Sumner's. Conclusion, the guy's a compulsive masturbator." He paused for reflection. "The problem is his damn boat's positively monastic in every other respect."

  "I don't get you."

  "Not a whisper of anything pornographic," said Gal-braith. "Compulsive masturbators, particularly the ones who go on to rape, wank their brains out over hard-core porn videos because sensation begins and ends with their dicks, and they need more and more explicit images to help them jerk off. So how does our friend Harding get himself aroused?"

  "Memory?" suggested Ingram wryly.

  Galbraith chuckled. "He's done some pornographic photoshoots himself but claims the only copies he ever kept were the ones he showed William Sumner." He gave a brief rundown of both Harding's and Sumner's versions of the story. "He says he threw the magazine in the bin afterward, and as far as he's concerned, porno shoots become history the minute he's paid."

  "More likely he got rid of everything over the side when it occurred to him I might put his name forward for further questioning." Ingram thought for a moment. "Did you ask him about what Danny Spender told me? Why he was rubbing himself with the phone?"

  "He said it wasn't true, said the kid made it up."

  "No way. I'll stake my life on Danny getting that right."

  "Why then?"

  "Reliving the rape? Getting himself excited because his victim had been found? Miss Jenner?"

  "Which?"

  "The rape," said Ingram.

  "Pure speculation, based on the word of a ten-year-old and a policeman. No jury will believe you, Nick."

  "Then talk to Miss Jenner tomorrow. Find out if she noticed anything before I got there." He started to stack the dirty dishes. "I suggest you use kid gloves, though. She's not too comfortable around policemen."

  "Do you mean policemen in general, or just you?"

  "Probably just me," said Ingram honestly. "I tipped off her father that the man she'd married had bounced a couple of bad checks, and when the old boy tackled him about it, the bastard did a runner with the small fortune he'd conned out of Miss Jenner and her mother. When his fingerprints were run through the computer, it turned out half the police forces in England were looking for him, not to mention the various wives he'd acquired along the way. Miss Jenner was number four, although as he never divorced number one, the marriage was a sham anyway."

  "What was his name?"

  "Robert Healey. He was arrested a couple of years ago in Manchester. She knew him as Martin Grant, but he admitted to twenty-two other aliases in court."

  "And she blames you because she married a creep?" asked Galbraith in disbelief.

  "Not for that. Her father had had a bad heart for years, and the shock of finding out they were on the verge of bankruptcy killed him. I think she feels that if I'd gone to her instead of him, she could somehow have persuaded Healey to give the money back and the old man would still be alive."

  "Could she?"

  "I wouldn't think so." He placed the dishes in front of him. "Healey had the whole scam down to a fine art, and being open to persuasion wasn't part of his MO."

  "How did he work it?"

  Ingram pulled a wry face. "Charm. She was besotted with him."

  "So she's stupid?"

  "No ... just overly trusting..." Ingram marshaled his thoughts. "He was a professional. Created a fictitious company with fictitious accounts and persuaded the two women to invest in it, or more accurately persuaded Miss Jenner to persuade her mother. It was a very sophisticated operation. I saw the paperwork afterward, and I'm not surprised they fell for it. The house was littered with glossy brochures, audited accounts, salary checks, lists of employees, Inland Revenue statements. You'd have to be very suspicious indeed to assume anyone would go to so much trouble to con you out of a hundred thousand quid. Anyway, on the basis that the company stock was going up by twenty percent a year, Mrs. Jenner cashed in all her bonds and securities and handed her son-in-law a check."

  "Which he converted back into cash?"

  Ingram nodded. "It passed through at least three bank accounts on the way, and then vanished. In all, he spent twelve months working the scam-nine months softening up Miss Jenner, and three months married to her-and it wasn't just the Jenners who got taken to the cleaners. He used his connection with them to draw in other people, and a lot of their friends got their fingers burned as well. It's sad, but they've become virtual recluses as a result."

  "What do they live on?"

  "Whatever she can make from the Broxton House livery stables. Which isn't much. The whole place is getting seedier by the day."

  "Why don't they sell it?"

  Ingram pushed his chair back, preparatory to standing up. "Because it doesn't belong to them. Old man Jenner changed his will before he died and left the house to his son, with the proviso that the two women can go on living there as long as Mrs. Jenner remains alive."

  Galbraith frowned. "And then what? The brother throws the sister on the streets?"

  "Something like that," said Ingram dryly. "He's a lawyer in London, and he certainly doesn't plan to have a sitting tenant on the premises when he sells out to a developer."

  Before he left to interview Maggie Jenner on Thursday morning, Galbraith had a quick word with Carpenter to bring him up to speed on the beached dinghy. "I've organized a couple of SOCOs to go out to it," he told him. "I'll be surprised if they find anything-Ingram and I had a poke around to see what had caused it to deflate, and frankly it's all a bit of a mess-but I think it's worth a try. They're going to make an attempt to reinflate it and float it off the rocks, but the advice is, don't hold your breath. Even if they get it back, it's doubtful we'll learn much from it."

  Carpenter handed him a sheaf of papers. "These'll interest you," he said.

  "What are they?"

  "Statements from the people Sumner said would support his alibi."

  Galbraith heard a note of excitement in his boss's voice. "And do they?"

  The other shook his head. "Quite the opposite. There are twenty-four hours unaccounted for, between lunchtime on Saturday and lunchtime on Sunday. We're now blitzing everyone, hotel staff, other conference delegates, but those"-he leveled a finger at the documents in Galbraith's hand-"are the names Sumner himself gave us." His eyes gleamed. "And if they're not prepared to alibi him, I can't see anyone else doing it. It looks as if you could be right, John."

  Galbraith nodded. "How did he do it, though?"
r />   "He used to sail, must know Chapman's Pool as well as Harding, must know there are dinghies lying around for the taking."

  "How did he get Kate there?"

  "Phoned her Friday night, said he was bored out of his mind with the conference and was planning to come home early, suggested they do something exciting for a change, like spend the afternoon on Studland beach, and arranged to meet her and Hannah off the train in Bournemouth or Poole."

  Galbraith tugged at his earlobe. "It's possible," he agreed.

  A child of three travels free by train, and the record of sales from Lymington station had shown that numerous single adult fares to Bournemouth and Poole had been sold on the Saturday, the trip being a quick and easy one through a change onto regular mainline trains at Brockenhurst. However, if Kate Sumner had purchased one of the tickets, she had used cash rather than a check or credit card for the transaction. None of the railway staff remembered a small blond woman with a child, but as they pointed out, the traffic through Lymington station on a Saturday in peak holiday season was so continuous and so heavy because of the ferry link to and from the Isle of Wight that it was unlikely they would.

  "The only fly in the ointment is Hannah," Carpenter went on. "If he abandoned her in Lilliput before driving back to Liverpool, why did it take so long for anyone to notice her? He must have dumped her by six a.m., but Mr. and Mrs. Green didn't spot her until ten thirty."

  Galbraith thought of the traces of benzodiazepine and paracetamol in her system. "Maybe he fed, watered, and cleaned her at six, then left her asleep in a cardboard box in a shop doorway," he said thoughtfully. "He's a pharmaceutical chemist, don't forget, so he must have a pretty good idea how to put a three-year-old under for several hours. My guess is he's been doing it for years. By the way the child behaves around him she must have been a blight on his sex life from the day she was born."

  Meanwhile, Nick Ingram was chasing stolen dinghies. The fishermen who parked their boats at Chapman's Pool couldn't help. "Matter of fact it's the first thing we checked when we heard the woman had drowned," said one. "I'd have let you know if there'd been a problem, but nothing's missing."

  It was the same story in Swanage and Kimmeridge Bay.

  His last port of call, Lulworth Cove, looked more promising. "Funny you should ask," said the voice on the other end of the line, "because we have had one go missing, black ten-footer."

  "Sounds about right. When did it go?"

  "A good three months back."

  "Where from?"

  "Would you believe it, off the beach. Some poor sod from Spain anchors his cruiser in the bay, ferries himself and his family in for a pub lunch, leaves the outboard in place with the starter cord dangling, and then tears strips off yours truly because it was hijacked from under his nose. According to him, no one in Spain would dream of stealing another chap's boat-never mind he makes it easy enough for the local moron to nick it-and then gives me a load of grief about the aggression of Cornish fishermen and how they were probably at the bottom of it. I pointed out that Cornwall's a good hundred miles away, and that Spanish fishermen are far more aggressive than the Cornish variety and never follow European Union rules, but he still said he was going to report me to the European Court of Human Rights for failing to protect Spanish tourists."

  Ingram laughed. "So what happened?"

  "Nothing. I took him and his family out to his sodding great bastard of a fifty-foot cruiser and we never heard another word. He probably put in for twice the dinghy's insurance value and blamed the vile English for its disappearance. We made inquiries, of course, but no one had seen anything. I mean, why would they? We get hundreds of people here during bank holiday week, and anyone could have started it up with no trouble. I mean what kind of moron leaves a dinghy with an outboard in place? We reckoned it was taken by joyriders who sank it when they got bored with it."

  "Which bank holiday was it?"

  "End of May. School half-term. The place was packed."

  "Did the Spaniard give you a description of the dinghy?"

  "A whole bloody manifest more like. All ready for the insurance. Half of me suspected he wanted it to be nicked just so he could get something a bit more swanky."

  "Can you fax the details through?"

  "Sure."

  "I'm particularly interested in the outboard."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't think it was on the dinghy when it went down. With any luck, it's still in the possession of the thief."

  "Is he your murderer?"

  "Very likely."

  "Then you're in luck, mate. I've got all sorts of serial numbers here, courtesy of our Spanish friend, and one of them's the outboard."

  *14*

  Report from Falmouth police, following an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Harding

  Subject: Steven Harding

  Mr. and Mrs. Harding live at 18 Hall Road, a modest bungalow to the west of Falmouth. They retired to Cornwall in 1991 after running a flsh-and-chip shop in Lymington for 80+ years. They used a considerable proportion of their capital to put their only child, Steven, through a private drama college following his failure to gain any A-level passes at school, and feel aggrieved that they now live in somewhat straitened circumstances as a result. This may in part explain, why their attitude toward their son is critical and unfriendly.

  They describe Steven as a "disappointment" and evince considerable hostility toward him because of his "immoral lifestyle." They blame his wayward behavior-"He is only interested in sex, drugs and rock and roll"-and lack of achievement-"He has never done a day's serious work in his life"-on laziness and a belief that "the world owes him a living." Mr. Harding, who is proud of his working-class roots, says Steven looks down on his parents, which explains why Steven has been to see them only once in six years. The visit-during the summer of 1995- was not a success and Mr. Harding's views on his son's arrogance and lack of gratitude were explosive and earthy. He uses words like "poser," "junky," "parasite," "oversexed," "liar," "irresponsible" to describe his son, although it is clear that his hostility has more to do with his inability to accept Steven's rejection of working-class values than any real knowledge of his son's current lifestyle as they have had no contact with him since July 1995.

  Mrs. Harding cites a school friend of Steven's, Anthony Bridges, as a malign influence on his life. According to her, Anthony introduced Steven to shoplifting, drugs, and pornography at the age of twelve, and Steven's lack of achievement stems from a couple of police cautions he and Anthony received during their teenage years for drunk and disorderly behavior, vandalism, and theft of pornographic materials from a newsagent. Steven became rebellious and impossible to control after these episodes. She describes Steven as "too handsome for his own good," and says that girls were throwing themselves at him from an early age. She says Anthony, by contrast, was always overshadowed by his friend and that she believes this is why it amused Anthony to "get Steven into trouble." She feels very bitter that Anthony, despite his previous history, was bright enough to go to university and find himself a job in teaching, while Steven had to rely on the funding his parents provided, for which they have received no thanks.

  When Mr. Harding asked Steven how he was able to afford to buy his boat, Crazy Daze, Steven admitted he had received payment for several hard-core pornography sessions. This caused such distress to his parents that they ordered him from their house in July 1995 and have neither seen nor heard from him since. They know nothing about his recent activities, friends, or acquaintances and can shed no light on the events of 9-10 August 1997. However, they insist that, despite all his faults, they do not believe Steven to be a violent or aggressive young man.

  *15*

  Maggie Jenner was raking straw in one of the stables when Nick Ingram and John Galbraith drove into Broxton House yard on Thursday morning. Her immediate reaction, as it was with all visitors, was to retreat into the shadows, unwilling to be seen, unwilling to have her privacy invaded, for it required
an effort of will to overcome her natural disinclination to participate in anything that involved people. Broxton House, a square Queen Anne building with pitched roof, red-brick walls, and shuttered upper windows, was visible through a gap in the trees to the right of the stableyard, and she watched the two men admire it as they got out of the car, before turning to walk in her direction.

  With a resigned smile, she drew attention to herself by hefting soiled straw through the stable doorway on the end of a pitchfork. The weather hadn't broken for three weeks, and sweat was running freely down her face as she emerged into the fierce sunlight. She was irritated by her own discomfort and wished she'd put on something else that morning or that PC Ingram had had the courtesy to warn her he was coming. Her checkered cheesecloth shirt gripped her damp torso like a stocking, and her jeans chafed against the inside of her thighs. Ingram spotted her almost immediately and was amused to see that, for once, the tables were turned, and it was she who was hot and bothered and not he, but his expression as always was unreadable.

  She propped the pitchfork against the stable wall and wiped her palms down her already filthy jeans before smoothing her hair off her sweaty face with the back of one hand. "Good morning, Nick," she said. "What can I do for you?"

  "Miss Jenner," he said, with his usual polite nod. "This is Detective Inspector Galbraith from Dorset HQ. If it's convenient, he'd like to ask you a few questions about the events of last Sunday."

  She inspected her palms before tucking them into her jeans pockets. "I won't offer to shake hands, Inspector. You wouldn't like where mine have been."

  Galbraith smiled, recognizing the excuse for what it was, a dislike of physical contact, and cast an interested glance around the cobbled courtyard. There was a row of stables on each of three sides, beautiful old red-brick buildings with solid oak doors, only half a dozen of which appeared to have occupants. The rest stood empty, doors hooked back, brick floors bare of straw, hay baskets unfilled, and it was a long time, he guessed, since the business had been a thriving one. They had passed a faded sign at the entrance gate, boasting: BROXTON HOUSE RIDING & LIVERY STABLES, but, like the sign, evidence of dilapidation was everywhere, in the crumbling brickwork that had been thrashed by the elements for a couple of hundred years, in the cracked and peeling paintwork and the broken windows in the tack room and office, which no one had bothered-or could afford?-to replace.